With their NBA.com site looking outdated, static and in need of an assist, the New Jersey Nets took a shot at a redesign last season. "It had been quite some time since we had done a redesign," says Nets director of marketing Shauna Sikorksi, "and we wanted to improve the functionality, organization and usability of the site, employing some of the different NBA-provided tools, such as our current Top Stories functionality."

Marketers often work by the rule that if they want to extend their reach to a new audience, a good way to do it is to advertise a single campaign through multiple channels. But recently, a study released by audience measurement firm Integrated Media Measurement Inc. showed that incorporating multiple channels can do a whole lot more good than simply driving extended reach: It can increase ROI.

Nothing focuses a marketing strategy quite like a recession. It becomes more difficult to bring customers from awareness to the buying decision, and marketing budgets are the first to be downsized. As consumer confidence softens, organizations look for strategies that maximize returns on direct marketing investments.

As recently as five years ago, the basic Internet monetization model was one that even the oldest of the old school, Time Inc. magazine empire founder Henry Luce, would have recognized. Vertical content (health, auto, travel, etc.) is shaped by professional editors and, therefore, easily categorized by the taxonomy engines that informed the first generation of online ad targeting solutions from pioneers like DoubleClick, Google and Tacoda.

Whenever we talk about online reputation management, as with most things in life, we immediately gravitate toward the bad stuff: a negative article in a newspaper, a bad review on a blog, a fake MySpace profile. In my experience, few people possess the vision to offer reputation management to people and companies without problems. Why does reputation management have to be solely concerned with repairing or defending a reputation? Can it not be about crafting a reputation to be about specific things? Is there a step beyond simply viewing a reputation as good or bad? Absolutely.

It's been a rough year for those who dedicate their time to protecting everyone else's privacy. They've battled the National Security Agency over its surveillance habits (currently focusing on the telecoms) and watched their one-time nemesis Google lose the right to keep everyone's YouTube viewing habits private. In a world with Facebook, it's tempting to say, who cares? But out of all of today's privacy battles, the clash between Google and Viacom has the greatest potential to change the amount of privacy we can expect online.

The difficulty in guessing how to market to a child, it's often said, is that marketers are adults. So, good news for marketers who have long since lost the innocence of their youth: Kids are growing up faster than ever before, to the point where many children ages 8 to 12 already think of themselves as adults. And these little giants have the walking-around money to prove it. Even more, they have a discerning eye for what they're going to spend it on. These days, it seems every kid is Richie Rich.

A video of a cute 20-something Hula-Hooping in just a T-shirt and panties makes for pretty good viral, no matter what she's selling. Or not selling: One particular video, shot by the woman's boyfriend without her knowledge while she was working out to the Wii Fit Hula-Hoop game, was posted this May on YouTube with the title, "Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit." It scored more than 5.7 million views in less than two months, half a million of those in the first few days. It inspired parodies by not-quite-as-attractive gamers gyrating in their undies, lots of …

In the midst of airlines shuttering, merging or going bankrupt and passengers' satisfaction steadily declining, Virgin America decided to throw its hands in the air and party like it just don't care. While stodgy legacy airlines limp along, Virgin, with its stylish new energy-efficient planes, techie in-flight features and Richard Branson's halo, is a whole other story. When the airline launched its West Coast and cross-country flights in mid-August 2007, about 2,000 people gathered at a hip San Francisco nightclub to dance, drink and listen to Branson - who owns 25 percent of Virgin America - talk about "the beginning …

Thanks to news search services, someone reading the London Telegraph online is as likely to be from New London, Conn., as from the home of Big Ben. Access to worldwide news via search can make us smarter while making newspaper publishers poorer. The Telegraph wants to charge a premium for its online inventory, but an ad for a UK business won't do anything for a reader in New London.